In many industries it is important to have documentation which shows you have been adhering to ISO guidelines. This can help you clinch major clients and demonstrate your professionalism.

However, when you’re starting out with your first SOPs it can be difficult to know where to begin.

That’s why we’ve pulled together a range of the best free SOP templates for you to work from.

Simply go through the available SOPs below and pick out the one best suited to your needs. We’ve included Microsoft Word templates and Process Street ones too. You’ll also find a guide for writing SOPs to help you get started.

Given that it can be intimidating writing standard operating procedures, we have provided a number of industry-specific examples plus suggestions for how you can pull together basic SOPs even if they’re not documented according to ISO standards.

Writing standard operating procedures in 16 steps

To help you make use of your templates once you’ve downloaded them, we’ll give you these 16 steps to writing effective standard operating procedures.

You can employ them within the framework of a traditional SOP framework, adhering to ISO 9001 standards, or you can use them to create the processes best suited to your particular needs at this moment in your business’ journey.

Writing standard operating procedures doesn’t need to be a grueling task. If you follow our collaborative guidelines, it could even be quite fun! (Fun not guaranteed)

Understand how you will present your SOPs. This step is about choosing your template to fit the needs of the process. In certain industries you will have requirements which you need to adhere to. The layout of your SOPs will be influenced by the kind of information you need to display. Investigate which international standards apply to your business operations.

Gather the relevant stakeholders. To properly map the processes in use within the company, you need to have relevant members of the company present. These standard operating procedures must reflect reality so that they can be adapted and optimized to improve reality.

Work out your purpose. Are you documenting your standard operating procedures in order to adhere to industry standards? Or are you confident your operations already adhere, you just need to document them? Are you doing this out of a general process optimization push? Knowing the answers to questions like these will help you prioritize your approach.

Determine the structure of your SOP. There are different forms an SOP document can take. Before beginning one, understand whether this is to be a manual, a mini-manual, or a procedure document. The larger your company, the more likely it is you’ll be creating an incredibly in-depth manual.

Prepare the scope of the procedure. If you’re mapping only one procedure within the document you are working on then you need to understand exactly where the procedure starts and where it finishes. It is important to clearly define the scope in order to reduce overlap with other procedure documents. Not doing so would lead to inefficiencies.

Use a consistent style. This is more writing advice, but you need to think about the purpose of the document to understand how it should be written. If this is a document used solely for demonstrating to the industry that you have documented SOPs, then maybe the language will be technical and trite. However, if workers are going to be using this document as a reference point, then you’ll need to make the language clear and actionable.

Use correct notation, if applicable. There may well be standardized forms of conveying processes within your company, but if not you could begin to implement them. Business process model and notation (BPMN) provides a universal way to explain processes in a concise visual style.

Work through all the necessary steps of the process. Assess the process from start to finish and note down each task required along the way to complete the process. This can be done in the form of a bullet point list with pen and paper or a note-taking app.

Try to assess potential problems in the process. If you’re looking to improve your process as you work through your documentation, now is a good opportunity to do so. Assess the basic steps you have recorded and ask if anything else could be added or removed. If something were to go wrong in the process, where would it occur? Where does it currently occur in real life?

Determine metrics against which SOPs can be judged. This is a great opportunity to make your standard operating procedures actionable and to find a way of assessing their positive impact. What metrics you choose to use will depend on the process you’re documenting. The key metrics may be related to performance or speed or a formula utilizing both of those variables.

Test the process. To make sure the standard operating procedures you have documented are the most effective, test the process with the employees who undertake those tasks on a day to day basis. Make sure they are able to give feedback on the procedures presented so that you can make alterations to the process, procedures, or simply the document style before submission.

Send the process to superiors. Submit your process for review by your line manager. Alternatively, if you do not have a line manager, find a colleague whose feedback you value and send the SOP document to them before declaring it to be complete.

Clarify the method of optimizing the process. A standard operating procedure document should track its own revisions over time. However, it is useful to have a general system in place to govern these revisions and how and when they occur. Creating a process for process optimization is an effective means of delivering this iterative change.

Run a risk assessment on the process. A process involves people or data or something somewhere which can be hurt, damaged, or lost. Make sure to run a risk assessment on your processes to make sure you’re not opening up your company’s risk exposure.

Consider creating a flow diagram. A visual aid to help other people understand the overview of the process will prove useful for people both assessing and following the process presented in the standard operating procedures. Including one increases the user-friendly level of the document.

Finalize and implement the SOPs. Once all participants and stakeholders have signed off on the document and people have agreed to its use, implement the standard operating procedure document for the necessary process and file the document appropriately.

Using Process Street for your SOPs

There are ways in which you can employ a Process Street template effectively for documenting standard operating procedures. The key advantage in using Process Street for this is that each process can be run as a checklist by staff members following the procedures.

Finding a way to balance the standardized layout of standard operating procedure documents and the regular actionable properties of Process Street will allow you to save considerable process documentation time as your company moves forward.

The most simple way to start working toward standard operating procedures with Process Street is to simply begin documenting your processes.

Not every documented process needs to adhere to ISO dictats. Within Process Street’s system a template acts as the standard procedures for a particular task. You then run the checklist from that template when you undertake the process without it affecting the original documentation. At its heart, that is exactly what standard operating procedures are in the real world.

If your processes are well documented then you’ve made a good start. If your processes are actionable then they are much more likely to be adhered to. No one likes picking up an SOP manual and sorting through page after page to find something useful.

With Process Street, you dodge that barrier and increase the chance of someone following the procedures correctly. In short, running your SOPs through Process Street helps improve process adherence.

Here’s an example Process Street SOP template:

This template is engineered to adhere to the ISO-9001:2015 Quality Mini-Manual standards.

Being a template, you can edit it as you please and replace the text you’re prompted to replace. The initial few sections cover the key information pertaining to the template while the procedures section where the process is documented follows.

If you wanted to use this template on a day to day level, you can store a master copy in an SOPs folder within Process Street and make a copy of the template which could exist in a different folder for use by a team. Your team could then run the copied template as a checklist every time they come to undertake the task.

This would be one way of making your template actionable within your organization once the SOPs have been documented.

If you want to read more about using Process Street to run an ISO standard quality management system, then check out some of these links:

If you want to keep physical versions of your standard operating procedures, then you can always click to print your template and save it as a PDF. This will provide a clean copy of your SOPs with the task list structured as being a table of contents from which other sections follow.

Process Street SOP templates for every industry and sector

Click on the dropdown arrows to gain access to SOP templates related to that industry. Do keep in mind there are plenty more templates accessible from our checklist template library!

Diversity Hiring Process (SOP template)

Holiday Leave Application (SOP template)

For information on how successful businesses are using Process Street for creating and writing SOPs, watch the video below.

Use one of these Word templates to build your SOPs from

The traditional route to take when someone wants to start documenting their standard operating procedures is to begin the task within a word processing system and create a series of smaller documents which eventually can come together to form a larger manual.

Essentially, it’s like writing a book.

The first template we’ll present is one of the most useful. I’ll explain why.

A general-purpose template with guiding notes

Standard operating procedures are important in all industries but particularly valued within healthcare. Lives are at stake and stated processes must be very carefully followed.

This template is from the National Health Service in Britain and was designed by researchers from the University of Oxford. Given that is template is a result of collaboration between one of the best universities in the world and the world’s largest healthcare provider, I think we should take it pretty seriously.

More than just being a template you can enter information into, this document contains highlighted text in each section which explains to you how to approach each task.

In this sense, document acts like both a writing template and a writing guide; clearly and concisely guiding the user through the document.

As my grandad would say, “there are many ways you can skin a cat” – not that you would want to.

Not every layout will feel right for every company. That’s why we’ve included a range of other options for you to choose from.

A formal general purpose SOP template

This template doesn’t do anything particularly fancy.

However, it is four pages long and covers all the areas you’ll need to cover in creating fully documented standard operating procedures.

Again, the template is geared slightly toward medical affairs, but only by specifying that one of the assessors is a medical director. Other than that, this is a fully actionable outline which is ready to go without changes or adaptations.

A general purpose template with tables

This template makes use of a simple table structure which makes it relatively easy to navigate and set up.

As you build out the sections you’ll find it take shape and begin to look like the standard operating procedure manual you always dreamed of.

It lacks a certain je ne sais quoi in terms of design, but what it lacks in aesthetics it makes up for in practicality and relative simplicity. At only 2 pages long, it’s less of an intimidating template for a beginner yet to take off their training wheels.

A laboratory technician SOP for workplace safety

This template is geared toward lab work, as you can see from the preview image above.

This more specialized approach from freetemplatedownloads.net would be effective not just for laboratory technicians but anyone working within similar circumstances. It has steps already labeled in regards to dealing with controlled chemicals and other such hazards.

If you work in a high-risk single location then this template could prove to be useful for your needs.

An SOP for conducting pilot studies

This template is geared for a researcher running trials and trying to adhere to strict processes while doing so.

It’s a very short set of standard operating procedures and isn’t going to intimidate anyone.

As you can see from the preview image above, it is geared more for pilot testing than for full all-out research. The goal is to record each time you have ran a test and to track the processes with the table provided.

This template is useful for anyone wishing to control for process variance when undertaking research.

A GP’s SOP for controlled substances

This getwordtemplates.com template is designed – as you can probably see in the image preview above – to help doctors with the management of controlled drugs when prescribing and dispensing them to patients.

It is quite a niche use case, but similar structures can be replicated by other industries for controlled access scenarios. The same principles generally apply.

This is a very in-depth standard operating procedure template in comparison to the others presented in the last few given above.

Process Street’s privileged password management procedure template

I’ve included this Process Street Privileged Password Management template here to provide a contrast between different approaches one can take for utilizing standard operating procedures for managing controlled substances or access.

I designed the above template, so I am likely a bit biased – however, I feel that the Process Street solution provides a more actionable way of keeping on top of monitoring, authorizing, and tracking given the flexibility and speed of the interconnectivity the software provides.

That particular password management system is designed for very large companies who limit access to highly sensitive data. If you’re a company that handles high-level client data, you need to have these kinds of processes in place to demonstrate your commitment to data security.

This template – like many of Process Street’s templates – is superpowered by utilizing Process Street’s workflow automation features.

More NHS standard operating procedure templates

To finish off our general-purpose standard operating procedure templates, we’re going to return to the templates designed by the University of Oxford for use within the National Health Service in Britain.

We’ll present a number of more niche templates that are geared for specific purposes. These should show you how to construct complex SOPs while providing you with the templates to employ in your business if you have these needs.

Excel database design

This template works as an example SOP for how to standardize the setup of databases within Microsoft Excel.

The specific focus of this template is on setting up the database for medical research purposes, but the structure can be adapted to suit any database needs. The real detail lies in the procedures which you can write to fit your specific needs.

Document control SOP

This includes elements like naming conventions and storage while also looking to help with standardizing processes. Though originally geared toward the healthcare needs of the NHS, this provides a valuable template for any organization looking to implement document controls.

Preparation and approval of protocol amendments

Throughout your business you will have different processes, procedures, protocols, or policies in place.

These are the general rules which guide our actions.

However, sometimes these practices need to change or be adapted after they’ve already been put in place. This standard operating procedure template aims to create a clear means of changing those established practices through the correct channels.

Qualitative research study protocol template

Within your company, you likely carry out a considerable amount of research. This research may be qualitative or quantitative. Either way, you need to have standard operating procedures in place for how this research is conducted.

This doesn’t necessarily mean you need to standardize methodologies, but you do need to establish how data will be stored, who has access to what data, how to ensure participants can give informed consent, and a whole range of other factors.

This SOP is geared to make sure all research is carried out to high standards.

Risk assessment templates to review your procedures

Hopefully, by now, you’ll feel fairly comfortable with what is required from your standard operating procedures and how you can approach them.

No standard operating procedure is complete, however, until risk assessments have been completed.

As such, we’ve included 5 links here for you to explore. We have two templates specifically geared for risk assessing standard operating procedures plus one example document to show you how the finished version might look. We then have two more general purpose risk assessments for those of you not aspiring to ISO levels, and performing a more casual documentation process.

US Food and Drug Administration. This PDF works as both a template and a guide to risk assessing your standard operating procedures and further risk management.

Newcastle University. This risk assessment form is general purpose and helps you predict and manage risks and hazards in any given situation. This is the example template created by the university.

Health and Safety Executive of the UK. This document is the combined risk assessment and policy template published by the Health and Safety Executive 08/14. This template is easily actionable and not overly complex while remaining effective. This is my recommended risk assessment given it is produced by a standard setting body.

Pick the right template and get started

As much as it can be intimidating when you begin writing standard operating procedures for the first time, we hope these templates, explanations, and examples have made the task at hand a little clearer.

Once you recognize the shared structures between different templates, you can begin to see what are essential elements and what are optional inclusions.

With that knowledge in mind, you can look past the unnecessarily verbose language normally used in SOPs to see that they are just very thorough process documents.

So pick a template – or two – and begin documenting your first procedure.

Before you know it, you’ll have an entire ISO level manual on your hands!

Have you written standard operating procedures in the past? What resources would you recommend for someone approaching it for the first time? Let us know in the comments below!

You could either add links to the supporting documents to your Process Street templates, or you could export the Process Street templates and add them as Word documents to your Google Drive folder. There’s not an ideal workaround right now, but we’re looking into letting users store static documents in Process Street folders, too.

Hi Adam,
please advise me how I could start writing SOPs for Mechanical & Electrical Installations in Building, Do you have any templates or links to help me specifically on this topic?
thanks and regards,

Hey! Installation specific – no. But, I think you might find these templates I designed for electrical inspections useful: https://www.process.st/electrical-inspection/ They’re meant to illustrate how you could convey inspection processes for technical matters within an actionable checklist which could be followed on-site. I hope this helps!

I’m not sure 100% whether we have exactly what you’re looking for as I’m not sure what kind of database you use. But you can see a bunch of different IT related templates we’ve done in these following links:

Great article. I have been using Process Street for a couple of years now but have not managed to fully transition my quality manual over to it for the following reasons:

1. As Henk mentioned, one needs to be able to create a knowledge base where the process and the associated checklist can be accessed.
2. In regulated industries, one needs to prove that employees have read the SOP as a form of training.

Do you have any further thoughts on how to achieve this? At the moment, I am using http://www.qualio.com but it would be nice if there was a way to do all this in Process Street.

It depends how you want to approach your “knowledge base” – the whole Process Street platform is a knowledge base. Your processes are in there and your checklists are in there. So, it’s maybe more about how to leverage that.

Perhaps you just want an easier or more formal way to organise these processes?

The benefit of that is that it is a centralised document of all your procedures. You could export and print that document and have a physical manual if you ever needed it. That’s one kind of approach.

The other, more modern but less formal, approach is to just have a well-organised process library. I’ve written about the different ways you could structure your process library here: https://www.process.st/process-library/ – using the folders and subfolders is the easiest way to a well-organised library, but the tagging system can be really useful too.

For large organisations, I recommended a live/staging folder structure with a Dewey Decimal -esque tagging system. But you can do yours any way you like!

As for your second point, you would just run a checklist of the SOP and assign it to the employee you want to train. They then go through and check off the items in the list.

Or, you have a separate training process which links to the SOPs in question and the employee checks off a task to acknowledge that they have read them.

These are all core features of the Process Street platform, (and really useful when used well) so if you want some further guidance about how they work then I’d recommend reaching out to our customer success team. You can just message them from inside the app, and I’m sure they’d be happy to run through how other customers make the most of certain features!

What a great resource! Which template could you recommend for a small catering business? Is there one tailored to the restaurant/ catering industry? This is not for an external audit except maybe in case the business gets sold one day. Thanks!

Or we have this longer article of mine from a while back looking at the history of franchising. It’s a nice read, but the more interesting tidbits for you might be toward the end in regards to how McDonalds systemized their operations, and then there’s a bit showing how Toyota approach systemization in a practical easy-to-replicate kind of way:https://www.process.st/how-does-a-franchise-work/

I hope some of this is handy for you!

Alternatively, if you want to create new templates for yourself from scratch, here’s a short article I wrote on how to create these processes even when it feels like you have no time at all:https://www.process.st/business-systems/

Hi Adam,
Can you help me with an SOP for Computer Based Testing industry? We book examination centres for clients looking conducting large scale computer based exams in different parts of the country. I am often asked for an SOP from the prospective clients. Thank you.

So, I think we have a lot of general templates relevant to your supporting activities, but you’ll have to create the specific ones for yourself. There’s a little post here on how to do that as quickly as possible:https://www.process.st/business-systems/

An issue date would stay the same. A revision date would be updated every time additions or improvements are made to the process. You would list the revision dates in order so that there’s a historical list of all the revisions to the process, if you were using the Word doc templates 🙂

Great article and resource.
I need to do a SOP on Software Testing.
I have been looking at available templates which makes up for a great resource, but still not something i can readily make use of.
Can you please help me with Software Testing SOP document ?
It would be really a great deal of help.
Thank you for all the efforts !!!

Can you give me a little more detail about what you would use the process for, who would use the process, what the scope of the process might be, and what kind of things you would hope the process would include?

It seems like a good area to build more processes for – particularly as we are a software company so can show off some of our internal processes for this too.

I have been asked to prepare an SOP for office facility management, facility check, maintenance policy and procedure for my company. its a construction and interior design company. Please, could you assist on what format to use and how to generally go about it?

It depends exactly what they’re looking for, but my preferred method would be to build out each process individually in Process Street and then to collate those processes in one of our mini-manual templates.

This means that people can easily follow the procedures by using the software. But it also means that you can export the mini-manual as a document to have a physical paper copy you can show people. Many companies still want to have that – and it sounds like that might be part of what you need.

For the mini-manual, I would recommend having a look at this post about creating a policy and procedure document. We have a structure template you can work from, and an example completed template too.

In terms of content to go into that template, we have a bunch of premade procedures which you can add to your Process Street account or just view in your browser. Some of these might be suited to you, some might simply serve as inspiration – if you add them to your Process Street account you can edit them to your heart’s content, hopefully saving you a bit of time.

The policy and procedure mini-manual structure template mentioned above is designed to be ISO 9000 compliant and the way we recommend approaching it is to list each of the individual processes in that manual as separate Tasks and then to provide an overview of each procedure in the detail of that Task, with a link to where the procedure is stored as an actionable business process in your Process Street account.

That’s the rough overview anyway!

We have plenty more premade templates than just those, so let me know if you have any other questions 🙂

I’ve been tasked to create an SOP for a crm software ie salesforce ,zendesk on how to receive, answer and send email . Need to list best practices along with photos. Is there any examples that follow this format?

We’ve wanted to put together some SOPs for Salesforce for a while, but don’t yet have any specifically for that platform. What we do have is a little project we created recently which mirrors how a lot of our clients use Process Street alongside their property management CRMs.

There are 3 packs of templates here which provide SOPs for managing different property CRMs, and hopefully they can act as inspiration:

Hello Adam,
I’m looking to create SOP’s for a Commercial Bakery. This includes the front office, Customer Service, Sales, Buying etc. I would greatly appreciate a template to work off of as this a pretty huge project I am taking on. Please advise.

I actually made a personal process not too long ago for the production of bagels! However, that isn’t live as an SOP I can give you – and I’m sure you have much better baking processes than my personal ones!

My company recently introduced a new P2P(peer to peer) model for their car sharing business. I have been tasked with creating SOP and processes that will maximize host as well as renter satisfaction. Can you help me to decide which template should I go about? Btw, great post you got here!

I am working on SOP for quality department in a Apparel manufacturing industry. I have to make the SOP for all departments including fabric inhouse, cutting, sewing and finishing. Also, i have to make a manual for the same.
So, Sir could you please assist me on what format to use and how to proceed?

And just build out step by step the actions which need to be taken. When you have it all on paper then you can start improving it and discussing it with other team members. Ideally, you’ll test it in the factory and find out what to add or remove.

If you need physical copies, I’d suggest making each SOP in Process Street and then exporting it as a pdf.

That will format everything for you. It will be structured so that it has an overview of the steps in the SOP at the top (like a contents section) and then it will be followed by each step in the process with any text boxes or clarifying information included.

Try building one and exporting it to see how it would look. That should do well for you.

Good write up
How can SOP be done for the office of a mechanical and electrical contracting company where lots of activities from engineering (electrical and mechanical) designs and specifications, materials selections, material request, materials purchase, materials delivery,materials storage, materials transfer to sites etc take place with the following sections involve purchase department, account department, commercial departments, engineering departments (electrical and mechanical), import department, security department etc

That’s a really good question and exactly why so many companies who have paper SOPs struggle.

If you use a cloud computing solution like Process Street, you can create SOPs which any team in the company can access. Or, you create SOPs which involve different teams in the company and so different tasks in the process are assigned to different people. Simple.

You can have one team following the SOPs from a tablet on the site and another team completing their approval steps on a computer in the office.

If you want to get a better idea of it, check out some of these posts:

Sorry, by mistake a posted the same question again, it didn’t appear to me at first.
Well, it’s a meditation and yoga classes business. We are going to operate it online, so all the process stating from the purchase, scheduling etc is on the web. Thank you for your attention!!!!

I’m afraid we don’t currently have anything specific to what you’re looking for, but we do have the following checklists which can hopefully act as inspiration and give some guidance to how you can construct your SOPs.

I have been tasked with creating and scheduling the annual review process for our Campus Security Department’s policies and procedures. Rather than tackle the entire manual at one time of the year, it is preferred that we look at individual policies and procedures on an ongoing basis. The process must include timelines for my and/or other key parties to review (as well provide feedback and/or approve), staff notifications of revisions, related in-service training and testing on knowledge and understanding of the policy in question. Can you please advise which templates might be most helpful for this?

I think it’s worth checking out a few of these articles and the templates which are in them. Across all the templates there are loads of different use cases, and for different levels of need – small team to big corporation.

My personal advice would be to have a minimum of 3 different processes occurring:

One which tracks progress: You create a big checklist with lots of different sections which correspond to sections in your existing policies and procedures (plus at least one section at the end for new policies or procedures). You then work through that checklist sequentially, assessing each set of items one by one. This evidences your progress through a systemized approach

One which assesses procedures: For each individual procedure you assess, you can have a checklist to guide the assessment. You use this checklist to make sure the procedure in question adheres to the quality standards you’ve set, that it is accurate, and that it is approved or marked for an update.

One which assesses policies: The same as the above other than the fact that policies and procedures will be judged on different things and it makes more sense to separate that out.

At the end of this process, you will have worked through each policy and procedure and identified which ones need improvement. You can choose to improve them as you go; section by section as you work through the first checklist. Or, you can improve them in one go at the end, or send them back to their relevant department with guidelines as how those members of staff can improve their own procedure(s).

In terms of templates which are similar to the first process, I would consider looking at one of these corporate-level ISO audit checklists:

Hi Amr, if you’re looking for something suitable for a large organization which has to adhere to standards like GMP, I recommend taking a look at our article on ISO 9001, which contains instructions and loads of templates exactly for this kind of use case.